Ex-Paterson schools employee draws 5-year prison term for scheme to overbill district

A 76-year-old former employee of the Paterson School District was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison without parole for hiring her own company to do work for the district and overbilling the district by more than $190,000.

Anna Taliaferro also was ordered to pay $191,000 in restitution, must forfeit her entire pension and is banned for life from seeking public employment in the state.

Her attorney, Dwayne Warren, said at Taliaferro’s sentencing in Superior Court in Paterson that his client deserved some leniency because she was a prominent figure in her community for decades when she worked in the school district as a coordinator who educated parents on how to become better advocates for their children.

But Veronica Allende, a deputy state attorney general, said that is precisely why Taliaferro deserves a stiff sentence.

“She took advantage of a position of trust,” Allende said. “This is a classic case of official misconduct.”

Taliaferro, formerly of Paterson but now living in Virginia Beach, Va., was convicted in December of official misconduct, pattern of official misconduct, forgery, theft by deception, tampering with public records and misconduct by a corporate official.

She organized programs and taxpayer-funded conferences for parents in her capacity as a district employee and coordinator of the Paterson Resource Center. She was, at the same time, the president of the New Jersey Association of Parent Coordinators, a non-profit organization.

Prosecutors said during Taliaferro’s three-month-long trial that she “outsourced” the district’s conference organizing work to her non-profit organization, while stating in disclosure statements that she had no financial interest in any organization that was doing business with the school. In addition to overbilling the district for various services, Taliaferro ran her nonprofit on district time using district employees and resources, prosecutors said.

“She, in effect, charged the district through [the non-profit] for doing what the district already was paying her to do as coordinator of the Paterson Resource Center,” the state Attorney General’s Office said in a press release Thursday.

Taliaferro’s convictions carry a sentence of five to 10 years in prison, but Superior Court Judge Raymond Reddin imposed a sentence on the lower range, saying Taliaferro deserved some leniency because of her age and her lack of prior criminal history. But Reddin said the law does not allow him to afford Taliaferro any more leniency because it requires a mandatory minimum term of five years without parole for a conviction on official misconduct.

Reddin ordered Taliaferro to surrender herself to the state Department of Corrections on June 6.